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project 2025
'Defunded and Vulnerable' Corporation for Public Broadcasting Dissolves Amid GOP Attacks
"The dissolution of CPB is a direct result of Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican allies' reckless crusade to destroy public broadcasting and control what Americans read, hear, and see," said Sen. Ed Markey.
Jan 05, 2026
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting—which helped fund NPR, PBS, and many local public television and radio outlets—announced Monday that its board of directors has voted to dissolve the 58-year-old private nonprofit, a move one Democratic US senator blamed on Republican efforts to destroy the venerable American institution.
CPB said in a statement that Sunday's board of directors vote "follows Congress’ rescission of all of CPB’s federal funding and comes after sustained political attacks that made it impossible for CPB to continue operating as the Public Broadcasting Act intended."
Patricia Harrison, CPB's president and CEO, said Monday that "for more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans—regardless of geography, income, or background—had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling."
"When the [Trump] administration and Congress rescinded federal funding, our board faced a profound responsibility: CPB’s final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks," Harrison added.
CPB board chair Ruby Calvert said: “What has happened to public media is devastating. After nearly six decades of innovative, educational public television and radio service, Congress eliminated all funding for CPB, leaving the board with no way to continue the organization or support the public media system that depends on it."
"Yet, even in this moment, I am convinced that public media will survive, and that a new Congress will address public media’s role in our country because it is critical to our children's education, our history, culture, and democracy to do so," Calvert added.
The dissolution of CPB won't end NPR, PBS, or other public media outlets—which are overwhelmingly funded via contributions by private donors and by viewers and listeners.
President Donald Trump, congressional Republicans, and conservative advocacy groups—including the Heritage Foundation, which led work on Project 2025, the right-wing roadmap for remaking the federal government whose agenda includes stripping CPB funding—argue that NPR, PBS and other public outlets have become too "woke" and liberally "biased." In May, Trump signed an executive order calling for an end to taxpayer support for CPB-funded media.
Critics counter that Republican attacks on CPB have little to do with ensuring balanced coverage and fiscal responsibility and more to do with punishing media outlets that are critical of Trump and his policies.
"The dissolution of CPB is a direct result of Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican allies' reckless crusade to destroy public broadcasting and control what Americans read, hear, and see," US Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) said in a statement Monday.
“Today’s decision to dissolve the Corporation for Public Broadcasting marks a grave loss for the American public," Markey continued. "For generations, CPB helped ensure access to trusted news, quality children’s programming, local storytelling, and vital emergency information for millions of people in Massachusetts and across the country."
"CPB nurtured and developed our public broadcasting system, which is truly the crown jewel of America’s media mix," he added. “This fight is not over. I will continue to fight for public media and oppose authoritarian efforts to shut down dissent, threaten journalists, and undermine free speech in the United States of America.”
Free press defenders also lamented CPB's imminent dissolution, as well as consolidation in the corporate mainstream media.
"Meanwhile," said human rights attorney Qasim Rashid on Bluesky, "billionaires continue to buy up major legacy media to prevent criticism of Trump."
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Project 2025 and the Year It Made
Over the past year, Trump has followed the plans laid out by Project 2025 almost to the letter, leaving the rest of the world reeling.
Jan 03, 2026
The year 2025 was marked by the Trump shock: an unprecedented wave of extreme brutality, unapologetic nationalism, and unrestrained extractivism that shook the world as never before since 1945.
To better understand what made it all possible, and how to confront it in the future, we must turn to its roots. Namely, to Project 2025, the 920-page report published by the Heritage Foundation, Washington’s most influential conservative think tank, in 2023. From one state department to another (security, immigration, education, energy, trade, etc.), the report outlines the strategy to follow after taking office, targeted for January 2025. It even specifies the content and timetable for executive orders, the presidential decrees signed publicly and in rapid succession by Donald Trump since his inauguration.
The report drew on the work of hundreds of conservative experts—as they call themselves—brought together by the foundation, which is lavishly funded by corporations and billionaires. What stands out most when reading the report today is the degree of technical, political, and ideological preparation behind the Trump administration. Over the past year, Trump has followed the plans laid out by Project 2025 almost to the letter. The new National Security Strategy published by the White House on December 5 reads almost like a copy-and-paste of the project.
Revealingly, Project 2025 identifies several political and ideological enemies. First, there are the globalist liberals, staunch advocates of absolute free trade and unfettered globalization, who are portrayed as useful idiots. Easy to defeat and despise, these liberal elites care little for deindustrialization, job losses, and the destruction of local communities and family ties. In contrast, the proud conservatives behind Project 2025 claim to protect these communities. They do so first by asserting US power in the world, relying heavily on tariffs and all-out extractivism: outright asset seizures (Ukraine, Panama, Greenland), imposing military tribute on Europe, and doubling down on fossil fuels. Next, they champion hard work, family values, and respect for natural and cultural hierarchies. The scourge of « fatherlessness » (growing up without a father, a situation that particularly affects ethnic minorities) is repeatedly condemned and blamed on liberal narratives that deny traditional gender roles and undermine the traditional family.
In reality, the true enemy of the nationalist and extractivist right embodied by Trumpists is the global social-democratic left. That left can win, provided it learns to organize and move beyond the liberal ruts of the past.
But Project 2025 is mainly concerned with an enemy it deems much more dangerous: internationalist socialists and their plans for a global superstate. The fear may seem laughable, as Trumpists sometimes tend to conflate mild-mannered European social democrats with fearsome Marxist revolutionaries. Yet it must be taken seriously. First, because supporters of democratic socialism such as Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani have become very popular among young Americans over the past decade.
Even more importantly, the authors of Project 2025 seem genuinely alarmed by international debates on taxation, climate reparations, or reforms of the global financial system that have gained traction since the 2008 crisis and the Paris Agreement of 2015. They loathe Brazil’s proposal to create a global tax on billionaires just as much as they resent the significant issuance of international currency (Special Drawing Rights by the International Monetary Fund) that occurred after the crises of 2008 and 2020. All the more so because the US will soon lose its veto power over such decisions as its share of global GDP declines.
A particularly telling section concerns trade, which takes the very unusual form in Project 2025 of two chapters setting out opposing positions. The main chapter advocates an avalanche of tariffs closely resembling what Trump implemented in 2025. Like the US president, the author seems to be under no illusions about the extent of industrial job creation this could bring. In general, the report displays little empathy for the poorest and relies on an instrumental, paternalistic, and hierarchical approach to the working-class vote. The main objective of tariffs seems to be to generate revenue for the federal government and to continue dismantling the progressive tax system—a project shared by liberals and conservatives since the 1980s, though conservatives have always maintained a lead in this area.
Project 2025’s second chapter on trade opposes such a strategy. The dissenting conservative author fears that by so openly repudiating the principles of free trade, the door may eventually be opened to global socialist planning. In future, opponents of the market will use this precedent to regulate trade based on social and climate criteria: the ultimate nightmare for conservatives. In the end, Trumpists opted for protectionism for both electoral and financial reasons, but the fear of a socialist drift is clearly acknowledged.
In reality, the true enemy of the nationalist and extractivist right embodied by Trumpists is the global social-democratic left. That left can win, provided it learns to organize and move beyond the liberal ruts of the past. Trumpist brutality is a sign of weakness. The US is losing its grip on the world. Across the Atlantic, some believe they can escape this decline by brandishing weapons and instructing Europeans to preserve their racial purity to maintain the Western alliance. All they will do is further tarnish their country’s image and convince the rest of the world that the future will increasingly be written without them.
This column was first published by Le Monde.
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Trump Is Out to Destroy the 'Meaning of Social Security'—in More Ways Than One
Trump spent 2025 doing everything in his power to demolish our invaluable Social Security system itself.
Jan 02, 2026
The walls of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which lies blocks from the US Capitol, are decorated with stunning New Deal-era murals. The most famous of these murals, "The Meaning of Social Security," depicts life before and after Social Security. The mural shows the best of America, what we can do when we all come together to build our Social Security system. Thanks to Donald Trump, "The Meaning of Social Security"—along with everything it represents—is now in grave danger.
The Trump administration is making moves to demolish the Wilbur J. Cohen Building, inevitably destroying "The Meaning of Social Security" in the process. Trump plans to take a wrecking ball to this key piece of Social Security’s history, just as he did to the east wing of the White House. But this is about more than just a mural. Trump spent 2025 doing everything in his power to demolish our invaluable Social Security system itself.
Trump ran on a promise to protect Social Security. Not surprisingly given his past history, he betrayed that promise over and over again in 2025.
Notably, Trump chose Russell Vought to be his powerful head of the Office of Management and Budget. Vought, the lead architect of Project 2025, made the Trump administration’s agenda plain, infamously declaring: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work…”
The very sense of security that lifted us out of the Great Depression is what Trump is destroying—and he wants to erase the memory that another way is possible.
True to that goal, Trump and Vought gave Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) unprecedented power over the federal government, including Social Security. Musk and his underlings used that power to:
- Force out thousands of the dedicated civil servants who run Social Security, disproportionately those with the most experience and institutional knowledge. That despite the fact that the Social Security Administration was already extremely understaffed and overburdened, with 12,000 Americans turning age 65 every day.
- Copy the American people’s most personal data to an insecure server for an undisclosed purpose. The data is now vulnerable to hackers—including foreign governments.
- Promote lies about Social Security. Musk and his acolytes falsely claimed that Social Security is full of fraud and improper payments, a lie Trump repeated to a huge national audience during his televised March 4 address to Congress. In fact, Social Security has a payment accuracy rate of over 99%—far better than private sector retirement programs.
In short, Trump, Vought, and Musk spent 2025 creating chaos, havoc, and trauma for the hardworking employees of the Social Security Administration, which translates to vastly diminished service to the public.
Elon Musk is no longer officially in government, but Vought still is, and Musk’s DOGE minions can still be found at SSA. Moreover, Trump’s choice to lead Social Security is Frank Bisignano, a self-described “DOGE person.” Though Bisignano has no background in Social Security, he does have expertise in hollowing out companies.
Before running Social Security, Bisignano was the head of Fiserv, a financial services company, where he laid off thousands of workers. Fiserv’s stock recently dropped by 40%. The company’s current CEO blamed Bisignano, saying that “many of the assumptions and projections set by prior leaders were too rosy.” Bisignano is now a defendant in several lawsuits brought by Fiserv investors.
Bisignano appears to have brought his Fiserv tricks to Social Security. Under his leadership, the Social Security Administration has removed longstanding metrics from its website. Bisignano is touting rosy new metrics, but the truth is that he is cherry picking data. For example, Bisignano says that wait times on Social Security’s 1-800 number are down. What he doesn’t mention is that calls may be picked up by an AI chatbot or by workers who have been diverted from elsewhere and are undertrained in responding to caller concerns. It doesn’t matter how quickly a call is answered if the caller does not get the help that they need.
Moreover, between pushing people out and reassigning others to the 1-800 number, field offices are increasingly understaffed. That means longer waits to get in-person help. Essential work is not getting done. That means millions of Americans may get hit, in six months or a year, with official notices informing them that they have been overpaid, and demanding that within the next month, they pay the government thousands of dollars. Millions more will likely be underpaid but never know it.
Importantly, Social Security is facing a financial shortfall in less than a decade. Rather than addressing it by requiring billionaires like himself to pay their fair share, however, Trump is doing everything he can to make the shortfall worse. His tariffs, record deficits, and other policies are leading to high inflation, which means Social Security is paying out larger amounts. Those policies, together with his deportation of hard-working immigrants, are also leading to unemployment and stagnant wages, so less is being contributed to Social Security.
Though the shortfall is manageable, Trump’s actions give Congress less time to act and increase the chances politicians will go behind closed doors to cut working families’ benefits.
What is happening is unprecedented in Social Security’s 90-year history. No president has come close to undermining it the way Donald Trump has done—and it’s been less than a year. President George W. Bush sought to privatize Social Security, but to his credit, he was totally transparent about his proposal. In stark contrast, Trump is seeking to destroy Social Security in the dark.
The very sense of security that lifted us out of the Great Depression is what Trump is destroying—and he wants to erase the memory that another way is possible. He wants a second American gilded age, with gold-plated everything for elites and suffering for the rest of us.
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